We can put it like this: traditionally, learning and teaching have operated under certain conditions. One of those conditions is that learning has often been considered to be a matter of recalling information. Now, I am not saying it should not be that, but I am saying that education involves more than that.

And this more involves "becoming aware" which is something you find in both the West and in Confucian traditions?

First of all, students in school, from the moment they were born, have been inducted into the norms and practices of their own society and into views and beliefs about the nature of the world in which they live. Education should be concerned with continually developing and refining those beliefs, because they underpin our actions in the world.

Thought and action should always be held in close harmony. So that what children learn in school should be relevant and significant to their understanding of their world, such that they can apply it in action. It should help to position them in relation to the world, so that they can act more intelligently within it. And acting more intelligently will help to inspire the need for greater understanding. One can think, for example, of the increasing pollution of the world. Children in schools not only need to know why it is happening, but also what they can do about it. And learning more about what they can do gives impetus to a greater search for understanding, perhaps about the impact of pollution on food production. If students are to become aware, rather than just know, they need to relate their learning to actual concrete situations.

Confucius identified learning (xue), reflecting (si), realising (zhi), living up to one's word (xing) and signification (yi) as essential to the development of the powers of thinking. Learning, he believed, involves becoming aware and is viewed as a reflective engagement with the meanings embodied in tradition. Now this is a very different account of thinking from the one given by many of the theorists who are promoting the teaching of 'generic thinking skills'. It implies that thinking is not simply a matter of skill but also of dispositions and attitudes.

Confucius also articulates a view of learning that challenges the concept of truth that underpins much western educational thinking. For Confucius, truth has performative meaning - the ability to live up to one's word - and is therefore something achieved rather than simply recognised. Here, again, we see a harmony between thought and action. Moreover, the Confucian vision of the learning process, as aesthetically ordered, and oriented towards the personal and social development of individuals in all their particularity and uniqueness looks very different to one structured rationally in terms of abstract principles of learning.

And can this Confucian view of learning be related to the concept of action research?

Well, I think it can. Of course, we will never know what Confucius would have thought about action research, but it seems to me there are marked similarities between the Confucian ideas I have been describing and the action research process. Examples can be seen in the relationship between theory and practice, between situational understanding and taking action, and the role of the reflexive self as a creator of meaning. In my view, the current growth of Lesson Studies in East Asian schools and in teacher education constitutes a culturally shaped version of the kind of action research that I have tried to develop throughout my own career in the west.